Tag: google

Google data portability

Making it simple for users to walk away from a Google service with which they are unhappy keeps the company honest and on its toes, and Google competitors should embrace this data portability principle. “If you look at the historical large company behavior, they ultimately do things to protect their business practices or monopoly or what have you, against the choice of the users. The more we can, for example, let users move their data around, never trap the data of an end user, let them move it if they don’t like us, the better.”

so maybe now marc canter can drop his “GData lock-in” claims
2007-03-07: matt lists the ways we let you take your data with you

Google growing pains

As the size grows, I see colleagues, particularly those who join Google from other companies, tempted to carve out fiefdoms and mandate SWOT analyses and extensive Excel spreadsheets littered with 3 letter acronyms. I have seen a few mid-level bosses evoke the traditions of Japanese management and schedule “pre-meetings” to plan, discuss, and approve what will be planned, discussed and approved at the actual meeting itself. MBA-speak creeps into the parlance and these new managers require the filing of more and more TPS reports.

google in need of a reeducation of middle management?

Google Books Search Review

The most startling problem is the incorrect use of the Boolean OR operation, the simplest of all. It is taught in kindergarten that the search for A OR B cannot produce less results than the higher found for A or B. Still, the query aboulia produces 26 items, abulia yields 40, but aboulia OR abulia produces only 35. Neither can a search for A OR B produce more hits than the sum of the hits found for A and B together at most. But this is what happens as illustrated by this simple search: for books with the word arrogance in the title. It finds 2 books. The search for books with the word arrogant in the title finds 6 documents. (Minutes earlier the software produced 8 hits, and such disappearances add an additional dimension to the confusion). The search for books with arrogant OR arrogance in the title yields 13 books.

oy. it looks like google book search has trouble with simple boolean operators.

Google Earth Integration

What might the implications of such a directive be for Google Earth and Maps? There are many opportunities for their integration with other services in Google’s constellation of products — and in the case of SketchUp and Picasa, such integration is already very visible. Other projects may well be underway, but that shouldn’t stop us from making our own little matrix of Google services and speculating on other ways in which geospatial data might come to infuse Google. So here they are then, the A-to-Y of Google services that have the potential for integration with Earth and Maps. let’s look at the current state of their integration and some scenarios for what could be.

some pretty good ideas in there

Google and the Gradient

The problem with a system like this is that it’s necessarily a bubble. Everybody inside gets treated grandly, but the outside world gets nothing. Indeed, because of Google’s notorious secrecy, they barely even get to talk to the people inside. A friend who’s a prominent free software developer says that every community member who’s joined Google has stopped contributing to public projects. It’s so bad, he says, that they’re thinking of banning Google from buying a booth at their next conference. They can’t afford to lose any more developers.

true about the black hole